After two weeks of vacation it's time to get back to work. I've just about caught up on email. All I need to do now is go through about 200 check-in mails to see what the team's been up to while I've been gone. I'm looking forward to doing a build and seeing their work. I know there's been some very cool stuff checked in and I'm anxious to see it.

 

I've also got interviews lined up that will hopefully result in filling the open PM position on the team. Not suprisingly there has been a lot of interest but, also not suprising, not many people have the right combination of talents. Contrary to what you might believe knowing a lot about aviation is not a requirement (although it helps). We're really looking for someone highly technical and organized who knows how to extract the best performance from a team of talented individuals. In my experience it's rare to find someone who'd equally gifted both technically and relationally and we're prepared to wait to find the right sort of candidate.

 

BTW, I have to credit one of our PMs, Kevin Griffin, for making a personal committment to the survivors to Hurricane Katrina. Kevin flew his Maule to the gulf coast to help in relief efforts. He shuttled supplies by day and bunked with a volunteer host family at night. He put nearly 70 hours on the tach and ran up a heft gas bill but really did make a difference in people's lives. You can see a picture of Kevin with a plane load of boxes on AvWeb.

 

I've also been catching up on the recently completed AvSim flight simualtion convention just held in San Diego. Our Dev Manager Carl went down along with a few other people and delivered a talk on state of the art graphics technologies. Of course we can't say what will or won't end up in a future version of the product but those in attendence seemed to drawing some correct conclusions. It was funny reading forum posts after the fact, though, as it only took about 4 messages before some people were convinced that what Carl showed was all we've been working on. Oy! Simmers can be such a twitchy crowd at times. It's like the reaction to our revamped web site, www.fsinsider.com. The first thing many people felt compelled to do was question its authenticity, perform domain registration searches and issue dire warnings that it might not really be Microsoft's doing. I have to say I don't really understand the paranoia. Anyway, I'm sure people's curiosity will be satisfied soon enough and that just about everyone will find something to be pleasantly suprised by.

 

To close, I came across this article yesterday. Since game controls are a central part of the flight simulation experience it makes for an interesting read.